I tried installing some multi-floppy games today but unfortunately my floppy drive is dead. I've got IMA backups though. Unfortunately, DOSBox doesn't allow to mount more than one to the same drive letter (like it does for CD images) which means I can't run the installation routine through cause it needs me to switch the disk in between.

I was able to circumvent this for some games by just copying the files or modifying the install.bat so it uses drive b for the 2nd disk which I can mount to that. But this doesn't work for all games, e.g. Super Space Invaders apparently wants to extract files and everything's hard coded into a install.exe. I have no way of installing that game (unless maybe I use a virtual floppy drive in windows which I don't want because of extra drivers etc.)

Seems kinda weird to me that this isn't supported yet. Does everyone else have working floppy drives or are you all just playing abandonware which doesn't need to be installed?!?

I'd love to see this feature in a future version. As the same is already there for CDs I don't think it should be too hard to do, should it?

thanks for listening

edit:

this

"To the OP: it seems like you should be able to mount a single directory (C:\DISK on your PC, let's say) to A: in DOSBox, and copy only the contents of Disk 1 to it; then, when prompted for Disk 2, simply delete everything in C:\DISK and copy the contents of Disk 2 into there, and rescan with CTRL+F4 in DOSBox. Doesn't this work? If not, where does it go wrong?"

from a user in a similar thread helped. BUT it's only a workaround and this functionality would be very welcomed

edit2:

bah, install worked but the game doesn't "abnormal program termination".... grrr

MikeRS wrote:With most install programs I've seen, you can copy all the contents of the disks into a single directory and it'll work from there.

Yeah, I know, didn't work in this case. But even if all games would work like that, switching the floppy disk is an essential functionality of DOS. If DOSBox allows using Images instead of real floppies it should support switching them too! Imho that is

the patch on sourceforge works as far as switching the disks work. I had it slightly modified in beta2.
However not all games work with it as it doesn't setup the tables and things like that. (so no lowlevel reading)

I don't like adding something as half working as that

A technical reason for not having it doesn't exist.
Aside from the fact that no one bothered or maybe even can be bothered
to code it.

Here is a first revised patch for the multi-floppy-mount patch. I hope it behaves at least a bit better than the original patch:

* First and foremost, some shared variables in drive_fat.cpp were moved to the fatDrive class in drives.h so that each mounted fatDrive correctly maintains its own data;
* FindFirst and FindNext were changed to allow for fetching the drive's volume label. The label now shows properly when issuing a 'mount' command. Note that upon mounting, a search for the volume label is automatically performed as to be able to store the value in the 'drivecache' label variable, so that Drives[d]->GetLabel() also returns the correct value;
* FindNext is now using modDate and modTime (instead of crtDate and crtTime), similar to the functionality in drive_local.cpp;
* The drive mounting type ('fatDrive') now shows up correctly in 'mount';
* Implemented exception handling whenever mounting errors occur;
* Also includes (dos_files.cpp) a small patch from ripsaw8080 for the 'Black Gold' installer.

Coders might notice that drive_fat.cpp features an ugly one-line hack:

I noticed that FAT12 mounted images sometimes fail to traverse a cluster chain properly (looks like it's related to the file's size consisting of an exact odd number of sectors, but not sure about that). I think it's an off-by-1 somewhere, but not sure where it originates from. the Seek() function (DOS_SEEK_END) seems like a possibility, maybe someone has an idea what the cause is. For the moment, the hack seems to work in the problematic cases (for example the Dreamweb installer).

If you need any help, I would be happy to assist. I have tested many disk images in my time, including many of the above. Most install fine, although the text-based Sierra installers need a SVN that will allow opening a batch file within a batch file.

Won't do anything for copy protected floppies though so Neverlock to the rescue!

That program, Virtual Floppy Drive, works just fine in Windows 7 64-bit once you find a way to sign its driver program. I love it because it allows you double-click on an IMA file to open it, so multi-disk installs become a breeze if DOSBox works with the installer program.

Odd. I don't remember problems before. Not to hijack the thread, but I just tried a couple of SCI0 installers with 0.74. They have no problems with copying all the files, but fail to write to the RESOURCE.CFG.

I would like to inform you guys that the devs have been kind enough to commit the greatest part of this patch into SVN a couple of days ago.

The only missing part is the one-liner 'hack' that I mentioned earlier, that was left out. I believe I've found the real cause of the problem why certain games such as Dreamweb and Theme Park refuse to install; drive_fat.cpp, function "fatFile::Read" line 123 should be